Subject: Re: [Gnu-arch-users] GNU Arch status update
From: Robert Collins <rbcollins@cygwin.com>
To: Tom Lord <lord@emf.net>
In-Reply-To: <200502070259.SAA06915@emf.net>
References: <200502070259.SAA06915@emf.net>
Date: Mon, 07 Feb 2005 14:22:33 +1100
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Cc: gnu-arch-users@gnu.org, ben@benfinney.id.au
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On Sun, 2005-02-06 at 18:59 -0800, Tom Lord wrote:
>=20
>=20
>    From: Ben Finney <ben@benfinney.id.au>
>=20
>    The roadmap says:
>=20
>        "GNU Arch 1.3.1 15 Mar 2005 -- This will be primarily a
>        maintenance/rejuvination release of GNU Arch 1.x. Experience has
>        shown that permitting the baz line to serve as the de facto mainli=
ne
>        for GNU Arch 1.x will be highly problematic."
>=20
>    For those who came in late, can someone point to these experiences
>    (blog entries?  mailing list thread URL?) showing that following
>    baz will be "highly problematic" for GNU Arch?
>=20
> >From my perspective, 1.4pre1 has some serious regressions.  For example,
> it does not build at all on one of my boxes (on which earlier releases
> had no problem) and, once tweaked to build, fails `make test'.
> The box in question is an exceptionally clean, robust, and rich Posix
> compatible environment hence my labling this regression "serious".

Some details would help be here. For example, if the failure is removing
libneons bundling, thats one thing. If the build failure is something
else, something that came from baz, I'd love to know about it - then I
could fix it.=20

Likewise the test case failures are very concerning for me. So what,
pray tell is the regression ?.

> In the pipeline (I am told) are baz changes that will make that
> even worse (e.g., a deliberate hard dependency on GNU libc).

Erm, the only one I know of is the discussion about using the system
regex library rather than the hackerlab one - and that only if we can't
easily fix :cut: in hackerlab. I'm not aware of any hard dependencies
planned on GNU libc - as native windows support is a major goal, that
would be pretty darn silly.

Where did you get that information ? (I'd like to correct it at the
source if I can).

> Basically, in spite of good efforts all around, on both branches, 1.4pre1
> falls way short of my quality expectations and goals and the expense of
> directly trying to fix it from its current state looks quite daunting
> to me.   Don't be confused about that though: my judgement re 1.4pre1
> doesn't necessarily imply anything at all about whether or not baz itself
> is doing a good job of achieving the goals for which that branch was=20
> created.
>=20
> Finally, I should point out that the 1.4 series isn't being killed or
> even direction-shifted.  It's still there.  Should my judgement prove
> wrong, and coasting on Baz's wake again appear the right thing for GNU
> Arch to do, the option is still open.  Meanwhile, the 1.3.X series is
> a context in which to take a more proactive approach to GNU Arch
> (including, presumably, merging at least /some/ changes from baz).

Cool.

> Does that clarify things a bit?  People often complain that I seem to
> always express myself with a "negative tone".  That's certainly not my
> intent here.  1.4pre1 was a valuable experiment, in my book, and the
> final chapter on merging from baz to GNU Arch is far from written.

Certainly it clarifies things for me, my incipient flame-bait has been
erased ...

Rob

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